The Current - The black market’s latest hot commodity? Butter

Episode Date: November 14, 2024

We look at the rich history and allure of butter, amid news that thieves in Ontario are stealing it in bulk to sell on the black market. 

In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news, so I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with Season 3 of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy.

On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current Podcast. It was like a scene from a movie. A heist, but not for money or diamonds, but for butter. There was a white sedan that was seen at the back of the business. They loaded the butter in and away they went. And away they went. Almost $1,000 worth of butter stolen from the back of a grocery store in Guelph, Ontario.

And it's not the first theft of its kind. Since December of last year, we've had nine separate incidents where large amounts of butter were stolen from local grocery stores. It's certainly unusual, but there is, we believe, an organized crime aspect to it. They're not stealing it in quantities that would be personal use. I mean, they're stealing, you know, dozens or more. Guelph police say they believe it's happening all over the country, with rising costs driving a black market for butter. Butter is in high demand these days,

and it's not just that yellow brick that you grab from the dairy aisle. You can get flavored butter, artisanal butter, wildly expensive butter. There's a British butter named Sublime that sells for $170 a pound. Use sparingly if you're spending that kind of money on butter.

Then there are butter boards, which are just what they sound like, pats of butter on a big cutting board replacing charcuterie boards all over social media. This is the latest viral food trend. You're going to see a ton of different flavor combinations out there, but I'm keeping mine pretty simple because it's butter and butter is pretty great already. Start with high quality salted butter, but that's not going to stop us from adding some extra flaky salt. Then top with lemon zest and lavender honey. Most people have been adding toppings or an herb of sorts.

I happen to have these dried edible flowers, which I crushed up. This was absolutely delicious. And a super beautiful way to entertain. A headline put it this way, butter has become the main character. It's always been the best part of dinner. Now it's the star. Chad and Marie Miller understand the demand and the love of butter. They run the Lofty Butter Company.

It's a small batch creamery in eastern Ontario. Chad and Marie, hello. Good morning. Hi, Matt. Marie, what do you make of the story of people stealing butter to resell on the black market? Well, you know, butter is delicious. Well, you know, butter is delicious and I totally understand, you know, with prices going up and your basic commercial butter blocks being so expensive now, like butter is really good. I have questions about the butter black market. I mean, what do you, if somebody's stealing a thousand dollars, I know you're're not the investigator but what do you think they're doing with it with a thousand dollars worth of butter hey i don't i don't really know like do you melt it down and turn it into a giant butter

sculpture do you like what what happens with it well the royal fair just ended so there they have a year to prepare for the butter sculpture winning prizes. Why do you love butter, Marie? I love butter because it is so versatile. I mean, you can use it and add it to almost anything. And for us as a small batch business, it was really kind of the vessel of our creativity. So we offer lots of different seasonally and locally inspired flavors. And it's just a wonderful canvas for adding flavor to food. How did you end up with that canvas? I mean, you could have gone into any number of different businesses, but why butter? Yeah, that's true. So Chad and I both just really love food. And we have spent way too many hours watching the Food Network and wondering how we could make food our livelihood. And we were

just driving through the hills of Northumberland. And I had mentioned, you know, it might be interesting to try making butter at home. So as the algorithm seemed to go, my feed started filling up with small batch butter makers on Instagram. And so I was following them all around the world. And then Chad, he went online and ordered a couple of books on how to make small batch dairy products. And we started doing that. And then we figured, hey, we don't see these at the farmer's markets locally.

We can't get cultured butter. So why don't we fill that gap and start making it for real and selling it at markets? Chad, how do you make your butter? Currently, we actually just finally got a large churn that's allowing us to turn about 80 liters of cream at a time um but when we started out we were using a 10 quart mixer we would culture our cream with special lactic culture for about four days make sure it's cooled down to a certain temp and then churn it up but it's a definitely it was a labor of love because back when we were doing it that way it would take about seven and a half hours to produce

70 pounds of butter and when we were doing it it would mean hand washing the butter so like after you rinse off the buttermilk then you're patting it to get get the extra water out once you get all your moisture out, then it would be cooled again. Then we add in our seasons. Like if we're just doing unsalted, there would be nothing added. If we get sea salt, we use flaky sea salt. A couple other top ones are like our everything bagel and our steak spice. So then we would hand mix about two kilos at a time.

And then we'd divide them off, roll them out with wooden paddles on a marble slab. And Marie would roll them up in the packaging that we have and then head to the market. You just rolled on past that. You have steak spice flavored butter? We do. It's our own blends that we come up with for our butter. We do all our own seasoning. We acquire all our own spices. So we're not using somebody else's already pre-made spice blends.

But yeah, we have a steak spice butter and everything bagel, and they are two of our top sellers. What makes, I mean, just describe how your butter tastes. And the steak spices, we get that. But I mean, salted butter does how does your butter taste chad it's just it's so much we find it so much creamier than your typical butter um like our butter has never been frozen butter that comes in the grocery store it has all been shipped frozen from the factory um we spend a lot of time it's a lot of love that we put into our butter that uh we slow churn it and it's when we package it like i'm hand rolling it with wooden paddles and marble slabs so it's not

heavy machines pumping it out it's it's just easier to spread it is you just notice it's creamier we use uh flaky sea salt so like when you're when you're biting into that like fresh warm sourdough with the creamy butter on top and you get those little crispy flakes of sea salt in there um it's just it's just divine like it's just it's just like a whole new world to food and also if you have been to europe and have had just like bread and butter with your dinner then you'll know what good butter is and so that is what our butter is for here so it's a lot of people say it's better than what they've had in europe um a lot of people say it tastes like what they remember having on their grandmother's farm. And that's because grandmother's farm butter would have naturally cultured and been a naturally

cultured butter as they skim the cream off of the milk and leave it sitting on the counter until there was enough to churn butter. It would have naturally fermented to give you that tangy full flavor taste that you know uh is a butter that a lot of people haven't experienced before chad how much does your butter cost because the process what you're talking about is not that high level industrial kind of mass-produced uh butter so how much is your butter so right now our butter is $10 for the rolls. We do a 150-gram roll, and you're looking at $10 for that. And then we do a few other specialty flavors or seasonals, which we've produced upwards of 45 different seasonal butters. We package them into jars at about 160 grams, and you you're between 10 and $12 for those, depending on the

flavor and what we put into them. Uh, just because we, we use local ingredients, we use premium ingredients. Um, for instance, we do a maple whiskey and we use 12 year old Gibson whiskey. That's from Canada. What would you say to people? I mean, life is expensive and just going to the grocery store is expensive. Buying the butter that I need to bake the pie that I'm going to make is a lot of money at the best of times. What would you say to somebody who says, holy cow, that's a lot of money for butter? We get that at the odd time. It actually seems to be less when they see that it's like artisanal butter and it's like it's cultured butter. So there are people that really enjoy the butter but like we tell people like it's a labor of love and that's it's almost life-changing when you actually

try the butter life-changing butter yeah like even the bakers like the ones that use it in their pie crust they used it in their shortbread they're like i've never had something so delicious that they never knew that butter could change the flavor and the texture of their baking. What's your favorite way? I'll ask you both this before I let you go. Chad, what's your favorite way to use or to eat your butter? Is it on a piece of bread?

Is it baked into a pastry? The pastry we know will often respond to different kinds and better butter. What's your favorite way to use it? Pastry, we know, will often respond to different kinds and better butter. What's your favorite way to use it? My absolute favorite is my everything bagel butter melted in a frying pan, and then I fry my eggs in it in the morning. Oh, man, I was going to say everything bagel butter, too. So our everything bagel butter, because it has all of the seeds and, and seasonings in it. When you use it on a grilled cheese and grill it up, it toasts everything up so perfectly.

And honestly, the only change you have to make to your grilled cheese is adding our everything bagel butter onto it. And it is so good. I've never said the word butter more in a conversation. It's good to talk to you both. Thank you very much. I'm hungry now.

Thank you. Thank you so much, Matt. Chad and Marie Miller run the Lofty Butter Company in Colborne, Ontario. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time,

it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. available now wherever you get your podcasts. Elaine Kosrova is the author of Butter, A Rich History, and she is in Chatham, New York. Elaine, good morning to you. Good morning. Life-changing butter, does that sound familiar? Yes, I mean, certainly life, butter changed history, if you want to really get into it. I mean, that's what my book is about, how butter became this not only utilitarian product, you know, the people used for eating and for cooking, but it turned out to be excellent for waterproofing things back in the day.

It was used as medicines. It was used to create ceremonies to honor the gods. So, yeah, life can be changed by butter. How did you fall under the sway of butter? What was it that initially fascinated you about this? I was the editor of a cheese magazine called Culture for five years. And in my travels, I would taste lots of cheese, but I also was in dairy country. And so I was trying different butters around the world and around this country, Canada as well as the U.S. So I noticed that there were different colors, that there was different tones of yellow on the butter. Some are whiter, some are deep yellow, some are waxier, some are crumblier.

whiter, some were deep yellow, some were waxier, some were crumblier. And then as Chad was talking about, there were cultured butters that had a little tang, some were sweeter. So I was fascinated by essentially a food that's made from one ingredient, it's cream, give or take salt, and you can add flavorings like Chad and Marie do, but it's essentially one ingredient. And why were these differences so apparent? So I went to the library looking for a book on butter making to understand sort of the food chemistry of it. And I couldn't find anything. There was nothing. There was some dairy manuals, you know, for farmers, but nothing that really got into the chemistry and the culture of butter making. So that started my odyssey. It was great. It was a great odyssey.

What do we know about the roots of butter? Like how, where it started? Do we know the origin story? it started do we know the origin story no we we we know that it it aligns with the domestication of animals and so we're talking about the stone age but we'll never i don't think i don't think anybody thinks it happened in one place and spread around the world we think it happened in many places with different animals because the first animals that were domesticated were a goat and sheep and yak. They were not cows. Cows came along much later. So the first cheeses and milks and butters were quite different than what we have now. What's the best butter that you've tasted? And I ask you this as somebody who traveled around the world looking at different types of butter making. cream. And it was all white. It didn't have any carotene in it. So, it was all white and it looked sort of like a pail of yard of lard. But it tasted amazing. It was really delicious.

But in terms of what's available, because this was in a tiny village in India, in terms of what's really available, I have to say that it was French butter that really won me over. They have been doing it right for so long, doing the culturing right with lactic bacteria that creates this subtle acidity, this delicious tang, but doesn't take away from the sweetness of it. So it was, it sounds a little cliche to say French butter, but really was, has been my favorite. Although I have to say, you know, in North America, their butter producers are really coming up with their game. Yeah. There were, there were dark days for butter in the 1980s, in the low fatfat craze you remember that commercial i can't believe it's not butter um we were all told to eat margarine instead and and the butter was going to kill us dead how did how did you weather uh those those dark days

well that even started earlier in the 70s i mean it went on for decades um i grew up in a household with a Scottish mother we always had butter we never touched margarine it was never appealing taste wise but margarine turned out to be full of trans fats that were not healthy for us so we were able to turn around the reputation of butter, but it was a rough time. I mean, I think the reason that my book didn't exist or any book didn't exist before on the subject of butter before mine was because it was demonized for so

long. You know, the culinary world didn't want to hear about butter because it was still oh this saturated fat we got to stay away from that so it's it's a shame but it's really come back in a big way as you can see from what's happening in the butter world now and the prices and and the and the thieves that are stealing it you know i have I have a thought about that. I have no proof and no way to know if this could be so, but I know that butter is more and more popular in Asian countries now, Japan and China. And so I wonder if there's like an overseas criminal element here.

Not to blame, you know, Japan or China, but I think there's an opportunity to send butter abroad and get a really high dollar for it. Wow. So it's just a thought. Different elements to this intriguing story. In a previous life, you were a pastry chef. Yes. How important is butter to baking? Oh, gosh. It's absolutely essential. I mean, that's the deal, right?

If you want a really flaky, kind of shatteringly flaky crust, you need butter. Yeah. If you want to make croissants, any kind of puff pastry, cakes, butter creams, it's remarkable what you can do with butter. It depends a lot on whether it's warm or cold or soft. You can do so many different things with this one food. But it's really expensive, right? And one of the things, I mean, I know I do this.

I know other people who will look for butter on sale. You'll buy it and then you'll throw it in the freezer because you could save a bit of money and use the butter down the line. Would you recommend something like that? Well, you know, it does slightly change the texture of butter because butter has moisture in it. It has water in it. So when it freezes, the crystals change and the way it's embedded in

the butter changes slightly, but we're talking minutia. So most people won't notice really any difference if they do freeze their butter. But I do want to make a pitch for the fact that, you know, we don't sit down and eat a stick of butter or even a half a stick of butter. Like, we use it pretty sparingly. I think a pound of butter can go quite a long way. So to say it's expensive, yes, but I can get a lot out of a pound of butter. And if I'm making my own pie or I'm making my own cookies, it's a lot cheaper than if I'm going down the road buying it.

Can you settle that we had a discussion in our office yesterday about this? There's a producer here. I don't want to name names, but let's say her name is Willow. And she was saying that shortening is better for a pie crust than butter. Not to be judgy, but is she wrong? Shortening is very forgiving to work with in pastry because it doesn't toughen the flour the way butter can if it's mishandled. This is why there's a lot of fuss about the temperature of butter when you're making pastry. You definitely have to be more experienced to get a good crust from butter, but you get such a better flavor.

So yes, I can see why she'd say that. It definitely blends when you have to blend the flour and the butter. It's easier to work with. And some people use a mixture. They'll use half butter and half shortening. Not me. I'm all butter all the way, but I've been making pies pastry for a very long time. What's your favorite thing to make with butter? Probably apple pie. Yeah, probably. I love that. But I use it for cooking. I'm a big baker. Now's the season for the apple pie with butter or shortening or whatever you want to use. Elaine, good to talk to you about this. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Elaine Kosrova is the author of Butter, A Rich History. She's in

Chatham, New York. What do you love about butter? What are you making with butter? Is it apple pie season in your home? Well, how are you doing? Butter is expensive. It's really expensive. And as I said, I'm buying butter when it's on sale. You whack it into the freezer and then pull it out when necessary. Your thoughts on butter. And if you have any thoughts on what's happening with the butter that's being stolen and where it perhaps might be ending, you can let us know as well. The email address is thecurrentatcbc.ca.

For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.